Life & Faith

A smorgasbord of delights for both the history nerd and the history sceptic. 

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“I think people just arbitrarily impoverish their experience by the prejudice against the past.” 

Does history get you excited – or make your eyes glaze over? This episode of Life & Faith draws together morsels of insight, warning, and surprise from some superstar historians and thinkers who want to show you a different side to the past.  

Simon and Natasha discuss the question: if history were a person, what would your relationship to them be like? Marilynne Robinson urges us not to separate ourselves from the pain and error of those who’ve gone before, Alister McGrath challenges our flattened-out version of the past, Nick Spencer ponders the law of unintended consequences, and much more. Join us for a whirlwind tour of the pitfalls and pleasures of history! 

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Included in this episode: 

Marilynne Robinson, “On our prejudice against the past” 

Marilynne Robinson, “On original sin” 

Rodney Stark, “On judging the past” 

Alister McGrath, “On Christianity vs Darwinism” 

Sarah Coakley, “On an early escape hatch for women” 

Nick Spencer, “On popes and power” 

Robert Woodberry, “On the invisibility of missionaries” 

Robert Woodberry, “On what makes missionaries invisible” 

Catherine Brekus, “On how women keep churches going” 

Nick Spencer, “On historical amnesia” 

David Bentley Hart, “On modernity’s creation myth” 

David Bentley Hart, “On how Christianity revolutionised our world” 

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Check out more For the Love of God interviews  

Get tickets to CPX's 2022 Richard Johnson Lecture 

In honour of a special occasion, CPX distils 111 years’ worth of marriage experience into one episode. 

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Mawwiage is what bwings us togevver for this episode of Life & Faith! With nuptials rapidly approaching for one member of the team, Simon, Justine, and Natasha talk to the experts – and among themselves – about what it means to not just get married but stay that way.  

“You get married and then, sometime right after you get married, you wake up and you go, I have now committed to be with this person for life. And then your next reaction is … AHHHHHHH!! Don't be surprised if you have that reaction, it's a perfectly normal reaction. It’s just hit you, the commitment that you’ve made. And then rejoice in the potential of what you have.” 

Bible scholar Darrell Bock has been married to Sally for nearly half a century; psychologist Leisa Aitken has been counselling couples for 25 years. These friends of CPX weigh in on why marriage is so hard, and what can make it worthwhile.  

“I always think of the couples that have been married for 50 years and they have stuck it through hard times and easy times and they’ve been faithful and they’ve worked out how to bring the best out in each other. There is something profound and really special about that. And I think it’s profound and special because it does echo, it does resonate with something much bigger that’s going on in the universe.” 

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Explore: 

Relationships Australia   

Lisa Taddeo, “My Husband and I Don’t Speak the Same Love Language”

Get tickets to CPX's 2022 Richard Johnson Lecture 

Astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman on star-gazing, human significance, and the prospect of extra-terrestrial life.

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For Science Week we are rebroadcasting this chat with Jennifer Wiseman who joins us to speak about her journey to becoming an astrophysicist and how she resolved the ‘science and religion’ question.

Born and raised in rural Arkansas, Wiseman grew up gazing at the night sky and had a general love for nature. Eventually, that love for space became a full-time job, where her curiosity about the universe taught her plenty about the God she believed in.

“Science is a wonderful gift and tool to address certain types of questions. How does gravity work? How do stars form? What’s the evolutionary history of the universe?”

But beyond the general mechanisms of science, her curiosity goes further:

“But science is not really good at answering other types of questions like, why are we here, how I should live, can I have a relationship with God. These kinds of things I can’t measure with my microscope or my telescope.”

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Jennifer was in Australia speaking at the World Science Festival in Brisbane. Thanks to our friends at ISCAST – Christians in Science and Technology for arranging time with Jennifer.

Get tickets to CPX's 2022 Richard Johnson Lecture 

Esther Meek’s childhood questions led her on a decades-long philosophical journey to towards truth and "the really real”.  

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As a 13 year-old Esther Meek was plagued by her questions about what is real and what is truth. A quest to find answers led here towards the study of philosophy where she has spent decades developing her thinking around how we know what we know. Can we ever have confidence in that? 

Her passion is helping make philosophy accessible. We all qualify to be philosophers simply by being born, she likes to say.  

She reacts against the idea that knowledge is information and data and facts but much more complicated for embodied, spiritual, emotional and imaginative beings that we are.   

“There's one thing you need to be philosophical and that's to be born. And so then I feel that philosophy philosophizing should be done for everybody. And it should not just be, as I say, the rock musicians who do philosophy in the streets.”

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Explore:

Esther Meek’s books - Longing to Know; Loving to Know; and A Little Manual for Knowing 

Gospel Coalition Conference 

Bible Society Australia’s Bible Conference 

CPX’s 2022 Richard Johnson Lecture 

Two years on an Antarctic research station taught Alex Gaffikin about iso long before lockdown. 

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When Alex Gaffikin was 22, she took a nine week voyage from South London, where she grew up, to the Halley Research Station on Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. She ‘wintered’ there for two years as a meteorologist.  

In this interview, she gives us an insight into daily life on the south pole, the pressures and joys of living alongside other winterers, and her dark night of the soul experience during which she experienced a crisis of faith. 

Still, there were other consolations: like visiting a colony of emperor penguins, and waking up in the middle of the night to see the southern lights and the Milky Way with no light pollution nearby to obscure her glimpse of the galaxy.  

Listen in to what Alex experienced on Antarctica, and gain insight into what she learnt about isolation, long before lockdown, and the concrete difference it made for her to live out her faith by loving her neighbour.

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Explore: 

A short article giving us a further glimpse into Alex’s daily life on Antarctica

Darrell Bock talks about the things that pushed him, as a young man, to ask deep questions about life and meaning. And where he found answers.   

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Darrell Bock is a world-renowned Biblical scholar with a keen eye on the cultural water we swim in. He’s also an incurable sports fan.  

In this interview he talks to Simon Smart about the impact of losing his parents at a young age and where that took him in his search for meaning and purpose. Darrell discusses his life and career what what he thinks leads to lasting satisfaction. What is surprising about the Bible? What is its essential message? What does it have to say to a person in the 21st Century? 

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Explore: 

Some of Darrell’s books 

• Cultural Intelligence: Living for God in a Diverse, Pluralistic World 
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• Studying the Historical Jesus 
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• How would Jesus vote? 
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The Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary

We’re languishing (still!) after two years of the pandemic. Can a burnout psychologist help? 

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Feeling a bit blah mid-way through 2022… still? 

In 2021, organisational psychologist Adam Grant named that pandemic feeling. He called it “languishing” and described it as “the absence of well-being”. 

“You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work,” he wrote in the New York Times. 

In this episode of Life & Faith, we call it something else: pandemic fatigue. Or just “not coping”. Natasha gives us her take on “not coping” being the new “busy” - in other words, the standard reply to the question “how are you?”. And she tells us how potatoes relate to pandemic fatigue. 

We also ask clinical psychologist Dr Valerie Ling how exhaustion and burnout relate to all of the above. For even if these conditions go by different names, they all seem to describe similar things.  

It’s enough to make you want to throw your hands in the air and go, “Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off”.  

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Explore: 

Natasha’s piece on “not coping” 

Adam Grant’s article that named the blah we feel 

Dr Ling’s ebook My Burnout Prevention Plan: From a psychologist who knows the cost of burnout 

The Centre for Effective Living 

Our episode on burnout with Jonathan Malesic

Philosopher and theologian John Milbank on left vs right, Harry Potter, and how none of us behave like we’re just atoms.

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If you’re wanting a crash course on “isms” like liberalism, secularism, and populism from anyone, it’s John Milbank.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Simon Smart, the philosopher and theologian has a way of never saying quite what you expect him to. He questions the idea that left and right are really in opposition to each other, calls the final Harry Potter book “a profound theological meditation”, and is enthusiastic about people’s longing for paganism.

What does he think Christianity might give people that’s surprising? “Pleasure,” he replies immediately. “It would make their lives far more interesting, exciting, and pleasurable - and physical, because they’re essentially alienated from their bodies if they think their bodies are just bits of matter.”

Does he think a revival of religion is on the cards? “The reason I do think religion may revive is that it is on the side of common sense … all the time people behave as if they had minds, as if they had souls, as if the good, the true, and the beautiful, the right and wrong, were real - and yet the scientific discourses which we have, or rather their scientistic reductive modes, can’t really allow the reality of any of these things.”

From politics to angels, Milbank turns his formidable intellect on some of the quirks and contradictions of our time.

Simon, Justine, and Natasha debrief on their fave reads/watches of 2022 thus far.

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The CPX team - no surprises here - love a good book or film, and also love a good gossip about them afterwards. 

Join Simon Smart, Justine Toh, and Natasha Moore as they gush about what they’ve seen and heard of late. 

Natasha repents of her snobbery about audiobooks, having been converted to the form by Trevor Noah’s remarkable memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. 

Justine makes the case for her claim (less than halfway through the year) that the fantasy/sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All At Once is the best film of 2022. 

And Simon is super impressed by Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel Crossroads - especially by his depiction of people of faith, in the context of a pastor’s family in 1970s Illinois. 

Race, faith, family, the multiverse, and struggling through hard times: some themes emerge as the team consider their recent cultural consumption, and try to persuade you to watch or listen as well. 

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Explore:

Listen to Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Watch the Everything Everywhere All at Once trailer

Read Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads

Watch Trevor Noah’s monologue about Kim Kardashian and Kanye

Listen to the Radio National interview with Jonathan Franzen

It’s been 50 years since the Watergate scandal. Our trust in institutions has never quite recovered.

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On June 17, 1972, police arrested a group of burglars at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Evidence linked the attempted burglary to US President Nixon’s campaign for re-election – leading to a Senate investigation that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation.

Since then, the suffix ‘gate’ has been attached to any scandal (political or otherwise), story of mismanagement and abuse, or suggestion of a cover-up. The net effect has been to dissolve people’s trust that they’re being told the truth. 

Half a century on, we live in societies of chronic distrust, as measured by annual polls like the Edelman Trust Barometer, and research conducted by organisations like More in Common, which studies polarisation and political division across the West.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we revisit the main beats of the Watergate scandal and its reverberations in our culture – and popular culture. We also explore what it means for our societies when distrust has become a way of life, and the role of local communities - including, surprisingly, communities of faith - in nurturing trust between people. 

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Explore:

Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History

More in Common’s 2021 research report Two Stories of Distrust in America

Edelman Trust Barometer 2022